Kinesis Data Streams

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by The Captain

on
May 14, 2023

Deep Dive into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Kinesis Data Streams is a fully managed data streaming service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows you to capture, process, and store data from disparate sources such as website clickstreams, IoT devices, and social media feeds in real-time. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams scales horizontally and supports multiple use cases with shards (unit of capacity) that process data in parallel.

Core Concepts

The core concepts in Kinesis Data Streams are:

  • Stream: The data pipeline that ingests and stores the data
  • Shard: A unit of capacity used to process data in parallel within a stream
  • Producer: The source that generates and puts data into a Kinesis Data Stream
  • Consumer: The destination that reads data from a Kinesis Data Stream
  • Record: A data unit in a Kinesis Data Stream

Architecture

The Kinesis Data Stream architecture consists of the following components:

  • Producer : Sends records to a Kinesis Data Stream. This can be implemented using Kinesis Agent, AWS SDK, AWS CLI, or third-party libraries
  • Stream : A virtual pipeline that streams data in real-time. It is scalable and highly available with data across multiple shards
  • Shard : A unit of capacity that processes data in parallel within a stream. Each shard can process up to 1MB/sec of input data and can emit up to 2MB/sec of output data. A stream can have multiple shards for parallel processing
  • Consumer : Receives and processes the records from a Kinesis Data Stream. Consumers can use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) or AWS Lambda to read and process data
  • Kinesis Data Firehose : Provides a data delivery service that can be used to deliver data to storage locations like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elasticsearch

Use Cases

Kinesis Data Streams can be used in various use cases such as:

  • Real-time analytics: Stream data from websites, mobile apps, and IoT devices, and perform real-time analytics to extract insights
  • Log ingestion: Stream logs from applications, servers, and network devices into Kinesis Data Streams for processing and analysis
  • Real-time fraud detection: Monitor credit card transactions in real-time to detect fraud
  • Social media monitoring: Stream data from social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to track sentiment analysis and mentions

Conclusion

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams provides a reliable and scalable platform to process and analyze large amounts of data in real-time. With its flexible architecture, Kinesis Data Streams allows developers to build data processing pipelines for various use cases.